[eagebhart]

I was here a year ago and now it seems I am back again. I'd like to help out, and maybe I can do that on a Linux VM, but I use a mac, and the OS X development is so old that it needs to be brought up to date before I can use it. I'm not all that up to date myself with my computer still on Lion I'm about to be 2 major OS X versions behind.

The lack of online documentation really makes things difficult. It was a bit better a year ago when songbird docs still sort of worked. I did find this link yesterday which was nice to see. I haven't seen this doc in a while.
Songbird doxygen doc.

Fossies also has this
Properties list which has also been invaluable.

I suppose I could go searching through Nightingale's GitHub. I just haven't done that.

I have been programming on Unix since 1981. I programmed embedded SQL, C, Applications, gui's etc, until 1995. I worked as Principle Systems Developer on the Output Delivery System (ODS) at SAS from 1995-2012. I wrote much of the infrastructure and many features including the tagset programming language, packages (zip) files, a huge number of output types and many other things. I'm currently working as Lead Engineer architecting a big data system for a new startup. Hadoop, MongoDB, Storm, clojure, java, python, machine learning, javascript, etc.

Last year I wrote a metadata editor extension for Nightingale and ported a couple of other extensions. After some frustration and feeling that development had stalled I switched back to songbird and started working on my own player.

I ported the Mutagen Python library to Python 3.3 and wrapped it in the SQLAlchemy ORM to create a music database which simultaneously keeps a database and the music files in sync. I have since explored several options in creating a GUI for it, but have not had the time to work on it.

I still need a player and I like Nightingale if it just had better basic functionality.
Editing of flac metadata and album art would be a great start.

I recently wrote another extension, which is a cross between a browser and metadata updater for tango music. It does the same thing as the Wikipedia extension, but can be switched between Wikipedia, TodoTango.com, and Tango.Info. Tango.Info mode has the extra capability of updating song metadata from the Tango.Info database when an album/product page is loaded.

Yesterday I modified NowPlaying 2, to have a fade-to-next button and adjustment slider. This is a very nice feature for me when DJ'ng a milonga (Argentine Tango Social dance). We play cortinas which are short snippets of songs. This button allows me to easily use any song. fade-to-next fades out the song, goes to the next song, and restores the volume with one button push. I think the toolbar could be prettier and it would be nice to be able to enable or disable the feature in preferences.

I'd like to put my extensions on the addon's page but edit capability seems to be required to do that. Although I'm not sure about my hack of NowPlaying. I think it
needs some refinement.

The extensions can be downloaded from my GitHub account.

Tango Info Pane
TrackMan
Now Playing 2 with fade-to-next

That's all for now. I hope to be more involved soon. I'd like to be able to use Nightingale for my day to day music player at some point. I'll see what I can do about getting the OS X development up to date.

[freaktechnik]

Hi

Cool to have you back on board! I hope you'll stick around this time, at least when you have time for it...

Yeah, our documentation is kind of bad - but on the other side it's an invitation to start a new one - maybe even a better one or completing the gaps in the one from Songbird (there are many...). As you can see here, we do have a backup of the old Songbird wiki, and at leasts parts of it will come back to our documentation.
If you don't want to have to go trough all of Nightingale's repos and contents of the repos (it's a lot, trust me), use the github search or our very own code search for the main code at http://src.getnightingale.com

Let's poke GeekShadow and hope he gives your wiki edit access, so you can upload your extensions there (and also help on the documentation...)!

If you have any questions or problems, feel free to drop into our IRC too, it's #nightingale on irc.mozilla.org.

[eagebhart]

Thanks! I'll probably start on getting an OS X compile this week. I'm not particularly looking forward to that... :-)

[ilikenwf]

Excellent!

One thing we need to do on OSX is update all of the standard Linux libs the build environment uses, all in the nightingale-deps directory...

Right now, it will only build under xcode3, with some specific bits from macports as well - see the wiki on that. Feel free to update anything, or add info. Macs are not our strong point here...haha.

[eagebhart]

I thought I'd just start trying to build it with up to date stuff and see what happens.
My dev environment is pretty current. Since I don't know this code just trying to build it is
a good place to start.

I'll dig around in the deps directory and see what I find. Right now, the build can't even find the deps.
One thing at a time...

My history is primarily Unix, and I've been using Linux since the beginning, FreeBSD for a few years in the middle. OS X is just a strange front end to a Unix back end. It can be a total pain.

[rsjtdrjgfuzkfg]

Welcome back

[GeekShadow]

Welcome back !

It's cool you found documentation, we still have to put back Songbird documentation online so...